Offline Apps News:
Leading Independent Research Firm Recognizes Alpha Anywhere as a Low-Code Application Platform that Can Produce Apps that Work Without an Internet Connection, Which is "Often the Most Expensive (Yet Valuable) Feature"
Alpha Anywhere 3.0 is the industry's first mobile application development and deployment environment with robust offline support built-in - allowing offline applications to be built, without adding any cost or time.
"Mobile business applications aren't truly mobile if they can't work offline," said Richard Rabins, Alpha Software Corporation CEO. "Until now, organizations were faced with a tripling of time and cost when adding offline functionality to a business app. Alpha Anywhere has transformed business application development so that developers can add robust disconnected operation into business apps with virtually no incremental effort or cost."
The promise of mobile computing is that people can work anywhere, anytime, but mobile business apps require an Internet connection to be productive. On planes, at construction sites, in factories, warehouses and remote sites, and even in major cities, WiFi, 4G, and even 3G connections are often unavailable, intermittent or expensive. Critical business apps – whether processing vital customer or sales information, or even patient, inventory, manufacturing or service data – cannot power today's organizations if they only work while online.According to Forrester in The Offline Mobile Challenge, the new release of Alpha Anywhere "supports a very robust solution for HTML5 implementations" needing offline apps. A robust solution is one that integrates fully with transactional back-end systems of record, with intelligent conflict resolution versus simplistic "last-write wins". New offline capabilities in Alpha Anywhere include:
- Fine-grained control of write conflicts, beyond a simple "last-in" wins approach;
- Data persistence when the business app is closed or the battery dies, including data not saved to the server;
- Built-in support for converting SQL data into hierarchical JSON data sets - e.g. customers, their orders, and the order details;
- 'Offline capable' applications with no additional development time.
Alpha Anywhere leverages HTML5 to build cross-platform business apps with native business app performance. It empowers developers and domain experts who are familiar with web technologies and database applications, yet requires proficiency in neither. Alpha Anywhere developers have often previously used Microsoft Access, Visual Basic, PowerBuilder and Delphi, as well as web development tools.
Alpha Anywhere is the complete, standards-based, front-end to back-end, prototype-to-production environment to rapidly and cost-effectively develop and deploy enterprise-level, cross-platform mobile and web business applications. Its low-code approach provides developer-friendly visual tools which easily integrate custom code written in common computer languages. It utilizes a single code base across all deployment platforms, and accelerates development by a factor of 5 to 10 over traditional approaches. Alpha Anywhere applications easily access and integrate with existing databases and web services, and can exploit built-in role-based security, reporting, business charting, scheduling, mapping and geo-location, and advanced media handling. With Adobe® PhoneGap™ Build integration, Alpha Anywhere enables app download from popular app stores and direct access to device hardware, such as the accelerometer, device storage, and camera (including bar code scanning).Additional Resources
- Learn more about offline apps.
- Watch demos of Alpha Anywhere's offline capability and read an essay by Dan Bricklin, CTO of Alpha Software, detailing how to build offline apps.
- Read a companion essay by Dan Bricklin on why offline support is so hard to solve.
- Read an overview of mobile app offline data synchronization.
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